Bay Area Flush With Exciting Plans to Blow Money on Useless Transit Projects
The ongoing slow motion debacle that is San Francisco's Central Subway just got a little competition from across the Bay -- last night the BART board approved a $550 million version of the Disney monorail to connect the Coliseum station and airport.
While we're outspending our East Bay neighbors by nearly three-fold -- hey, this is San Francisco! -- the potential BART extension will not have the federal government picking up the majority of its ever-expanding price tag. Sure, the BART folks have access to $70 million in federal largesse -- but that's Monopoly money with a project like this: The rest is coming from loans, surcharges on flights out of Oakland Airport -- and, dare we predict it, the Bob Moses special: Regardless of cost overruns, once you're half done with a transit project, you'll get the money you need to finish. Half a project's no good.
Glancing over the arguments in favor of the Oakland Airport extension, the BART board's decision-making prowess appears to be on-par with that of a victim-to-be in a Friday the 13th movie. No, you shouldn't walk into the abandoned, creepy house armed only with a flashlight -- and you shouldn't commit vast sums of money to a project whose budget has quadrupled in recent years while its projected ridership has been cut by two-thirds -- and whose anticipated ticket price will cost riders twice as much as the perfectly adequate bus line now servicing them.
This is the problem with politicians -- and, it would seem, political boards. Egregiously expensive major capital projects are sexy. Stabilizing our fraying infrastructure and adding to our existing service is not; no one ever had a bus line named after him (or, incidentally, a retrofitting project).
As for the argument that the BART line will bring the region much-needed jobs, this could be true: But at what cost? As is also the case with the largely federally subsidized $1.5 billion (for now) Central Subway, these projects will last eons longer than the jobs of the workers who crafted them. And they will have to be maintained -- this time, on our dime. And if, as a number of observers predict, they do indeed turn out to be useless, the money spent keeping them up will continue to starve the BART and Muni systems. This will be most keenly felt by the riders wading through mounds of human effluvia to find a seat, getting robbed on public transit, or freezing on a platform while waiting for a bus or train that just isn't coming. It's a shame that "we need the jobs" is an excuse only trotted out when justifying a boondoggle.
Kudos, by the way, to San Francisco's BART board rep, Tom Radulovich, for casting the only "no" vote on this project.
Plenty of derision was rightly cast on Alaska politicians for the famed "bridge to nowhere" -- which also would have provided hard-working local folks with jobs, we can imagine. It warrants mentioning that the Gravina Island Bridge was only slated to cost $400 million.
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